Sheila Hicks' work is deeply influenced by the technical work and symbology of Pre-Columbian textiles. During her stay in Chile at the end of the 1950s, she studied the depth and respect with which Andean cultures worked the fabrics that, in their societies, represented both a way of relating between peers, as well as a means of communicating and learning their cosmogony.
Exploring these principles over more than six decades, in 'Los Hermanos' she takes up the possibilities of textiles as a form of language and evocation. In each of the bundles that make up the installation, composed of linen, silk, cotton and bamboo, Hicks introduced a secret object of which no one knows its type or meaning. The possibility that hidden information offers - suggesting the intangible deposit of memory in objects - beyond inviting to discover its content, is to generate as many narratives as the imagination desires.
This piece starts from an aesthetic approach to the forms of communication and recording of information of the Andean cultures. The fabric nodules are related to the quipus, a graphic writing system whose content is considered numerical, although it has also been speculated that it is literary, and in which each textile element constitutes a symbol. In the traditional quipus, which in Quechua means "knot", the bundles are placed at different heights along a rope according to the content that is being articulated.
In this case, the knots of fabrics and threads are arranged in a composition without an established order and subject to the deciphering that the viewer makes of the installation. Originally, the quipus also hid information that could only be deciphered by the quipucamayoc (guardian of the quipu and of the Inca Empire). In this way, Hicks s the Andean tradition and builds her own artistic and aesthetic language from spinning.
Likewise, knots can be understood as a form of ideograms that, following the reference to the Andean culture, places the symbol as a container for various ideas, unlike Western languages in which each word is defined practically unequivocally. In this context, Hicks attends to both the importance of textiles and art as forms not only of communication, but also of learning and relating to the world.
AC, January 2021.
References
Sheila Hicks. Hilos Libres. El textil y sus raíces prehispánicas, 1954-2017. Exhibition pamphlet. Puebla: Amparo Museum, 2017
/exposiciones/piezas/98/sheila-hicks-hilos-libres-el-textil-y-sus-rai-ces-prehispa-nicas-1954-2017
https://museo.precolombino.cl/wp-content/s/2020/10/Sheila-Hicks.-Reencuentro.pdf
Sheila Hicks' work is deeply influenced by the technical work and symbology of Pre-Columbian textiles. During her stay in Chile at the end of the 1950s, she studied the depth and respect with which Andean cultures worked the fabrics that, in their societies, represented both a way of relating between peers, as well as a means of communicating and learning their cosmogony.
